Who Ordered That?
Aayna Vinaya
Who Ordered That?
Introducing le Service à l’Indienne
Meals of the French aristocracy in the late 17th century were divided into three or sometimes four services, each composed of a number of dishes large and small, hot and cold, savory and sweet. The more guests, the greater the assortment of dishes, depending too on the occasion and the wealth of the host. For each service, servants simultaneously brought in diverse elaborately decorated dishes, in an orchestrated fashion, and placed them in a calculated symmetrical arrangement on the already elaborately decorated table. The hosts or their servants would generally ladle the soup, carve the meat, and portion the fish, while the guests would help themselves and assist their tablemates to the rest. The French style had its drawbacks: with so many dishes on the table, diners were largely limited to those within reach, and hot food grew cold. This was service à la française.
Then about 1810, Prince Alexander Kourakine, the Russian ambassador to Paris, presented a meal where footmen served each person a sequence of individually plated dishes that were garnished, dressed with sauce, and served with sides — all at their ideal temperatures. This sequential, multicourse meal, which required an intimidating array of china and silverware and a small army of servants, slowly replaced service à la française. The great 19th-century chefs Urbain Dubois and Marie-Antoine Carême objected to the lack of luxury, elegance, and visual theater, but Dubois also saw the advantages and he popularized it, and by the 1880s service à la russe had become more French than service à la française. Today, the classical French meal declared by UNESCO to be part of the “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity” is served à la russe!
Two centuries after Kourakine, the West, mostly unknowingly, reveres and emulates the sequential service à la russe during dinner parties, at casual eateries, and in fine-dining establishments, with elements of the old service à la française surviving at family gatherings, potlucks, and all-you-can-eat buffets. But at a time when culinary borders (at the very least) are blurry, I ask you to temporarily forget those two styles and look East, toward Asia, South Asia to be specific. Here lies India, a country with over one-sixth of the world’s population. Indians have more to offer the global culinary scene than curries, chai, and naan! We have a whole service style with untapped potential: the thali.
Thali, literally, means a plate or platter. Conceptually, a thali is an entire meal composed of several dishes served on a single platter, a mini buffet on a plate if you like. The platter could be brass, stainless steel, or, in some low-budget and eco-unconscious situations, Styrofoam! But your thali could also be a fresh banana leaf, likely to be seen in Southern India, or dried leaves of teak, areca palm, etc., that have been pressed and sewn together. As an event, thalis can be simple or the epitome of opulence. They can be meant for one, such as when you sit down for a Keralite sadhya during Onam, or they can be shared by many, such as a thaal served by the Dawoodi Bohras, in which traditionally eight people sit and eat their meal around and from a gigantic platter. A thali is defined by a region and a culture but also an occasion. A thali is versatility at its best, and no matter how big or small, festive or quotidian, a thali, to me, always feels like a celebration (even the feast offered during a bojja, the 13th day of mourning in the Bunt community).
India’s myriad thalis have their unique names and characteristics. It is almost criminal to generalize about them — I am doing them a grave injustice and diluting their cultural worth even simply by using the word thali as an umbrella term. But in attempting to unify them conceptually, I hope to capture the essence and beauty of a meal served thali-style.
It begins with an empty platter or large leaf placed in front of you. Generally, there is no menu to tell you what is to come. You wait in excitement and anticipation. Often the meal begins with a symbolic serving of salt, which is deemed to be salivatory and peristaltic. Perhaps the salt helps stimulate the appetite, but it also allows you to season your food per your preference without abrading the cook’s ego! The salt in your food should be your prerogative, don’t you think?
Slowly and surely, bits and bobs of food ceremoniously appear on your platter. Thalis, consciously or unconsciously, encompass the six rasas, or tastes, recognized by Ayurveda: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter, and astringent. And various textures come into play. Ringing your plate are fritters, crisp papads, spicy pickles, chutney, raitas, savory tidbits, crudités, tiny bowls filled with comforting lentils and fragrant curries, stir-fries, a sweet dish or two, a fruit perhaps; a palette is formed. Rice and breads take center position and are the canvas for the display of flavor and texture. Rice is prominent in thalis across India. In some parts of the country, thalis are called “rice plates,” while the numerous lamb preparations of a Kashmiri wazwan are exclusively served on a heaped platterful of rice. A savory beverage — India has a few of those (which include salted chais), such as spiced buttermilk, the blush-pink solkadi, a tangy jal jeera, or a piquant rasam — may be offered as a palate cleanser. With your materials in order, you become the artist of your meal, your fingers the brush. The permutations and combinations that come while you take a nip of this and a nibble of that are vast.
Some thalis do seem to have a sequence. In a Bengali thali, the bitter shukto is meant to be savored first; in a Kannadiga thali, cold curd rice tempered with curry leaves is normally served last. Even so, quickly, and eventually, your thali is filled with all the items you are meant to eat. The sequence of the meal then is not a precept but merely a suggestion — there is no right or wrong way when you are consuming a thali. Feel free to start with something sweet, have a smidgen of something bitter, mix with something pungent, bite into a morsel of something salty, then go back to the sweet, and finish off with sour. No starting with hors d’oeuvres and waiting until dessert to satisfy your sweet tooth.
A thali may contain a pièce de resistance, but this shouldn’t be considered as the main course. The main course is whatever you decide it to be. For me, it is made up of the items with jaggery in them, and, mind you, not all of them are considered dessert. In a Maharashtrian thali, it is the sweet-lentil-paste-stuffed flatbread called puran poli, topped with ghee and served with katachi umti, a tangy-spicy broth made from the stock strained from the cooked lentils; in a Rajasthani thali, it is the baati, baked balls of dough served with dal and churma (sweetened baati crumbs); in a South Indian meal, it is always the payasam, a pudding made from grain or lentils cooked in coconut milk and garnished with nuts. But, for you, the main course could be the soft pillow of cottage cheese, topli-nu-paneer, served during the bhonu at a Parsi wedding; the unctuous, nutty, and mildly spicy doh neiiong, a pork dish with black sesame seeds that you would add to your plate at a jadoh stall in the East Khasi Hills of Meghalaya; or the sarson da saag, a puréed mustard-leaf stir-fry scooped up with warm makki di roti, a flatbread made from cornmeal on special occasions in winter in a Punjabi household. But even attempting to think of an Indian meal in terms of courses seems flawed, because the meal is just not linear.
And yet lines do play a crucial role in thalis. Ceremonial and public thalis are traditionally eaten in a pangat. Pangats are when people are seated in lines and rows for a meal, which truly is, dare I say, the simplest and most efficient arrangement of seating for serving food. Adult, child, man, woman, rich, poor typically sit beside each other and are served a dignified meal. In a culture where gender, class, creed, and caste are so deeply rooted, a pangat sometimes becomes an equalizer. Surely this is significant. Socially, sitting in a file is nonhierarchical, therefore more inclusive, and more open than sitting at rectangular dining tables and less condensed than at round tables. At the same time, rows limit interactions with other eaters, so your focus is more on the server and your plate.
Always, when you are eating a thali, you are served. Unlike a typical restaurant where servers wait on one section or particular tables, those serving a thali generally attend to all the diners present, serving them swiftly and consecutively, a server being assigned anywhere from one to four items. This gives each server and guest a moment to interact. Sometimes a short-lived banter occurs in which you are coaxed to take a second or even a third helping, with service stopping only when you decide to stop eating. This friendly indulgence reflects the elemental motto of Indian hospitality, Athithi Devo Bhava — “The guest is like God.” It is always safer to overfeed the godly guest than, Guest forbid, leave them with an iota of an empty belly. But, Guest, your eyes mustn’t be bigger than your stomach, because having leftovers on your plate is generally frowned upon. Personally, eating a thali forces me to be a disciplined eater — graciously accepting or declining the food offered, and planning my meal so as to eat only as much as I like and need.
Everyday home-style Indian cooking is simple and straightforward, but when it comes to preparing the dishes that some of the festive thalis demand, we are willing to put in painstaking effort. A festive thali is a kaleidoscope of culinary craftsmanship, heirloom recipes, and the region and season’s best produce. No one attempts to source caviar from the Caspian Sea for flair. In fact, the opposite happens. Thalis make heroes of regional mangoes in summer and root vegetables in winter. Local and indigenous biodiversity is put on a pedestal.
Ritualistic thali meals are mostly cooked by men and axiomatically so: isn’t a man’s place in the kitchen? Hindu ceremonial meals are mostly cooked by brahmins, who aren’t encouraged to associate with lower castes and yet, strangely, can cook for them; the Botis of Himachal, Shivallis of Udupi, Menarias of Rajasthan, Suars of Orissa, Bamons of Manipur have been cooks for generations. A slightly different group, the Wazas of Kashmir, Rakabdars of Awadh, and khansamas across the country, too, come from a lineage of trained cooks. You may think that some of these folks are desi versions of Jacques Pépin, Marco Pierre White, or Thomas Keller, right? Wrong. Even though they are instrumental to these thalis, they are mere creatures of tradition driven by recipe and rasa. There is very little room for individual expression. The results of their hard labor unostentatiously arrive from the kitchen in pails and are ladled onto your platters.
But to sum all this up and hail the thali and specifically a thali-style service…
Culturally and socially, thalis are complex, but their core is a plate of food and an eater. The host, the cook, and the server are secondary. Somewhere along the way, the West has overcomplicated the act of eating by dictating when to eat what, what to pair with what, how much of each thing to eat, at what pace, with what instrument. A thali-style service puts the power back in the eaters’ hands (figuratively and literally), while engaging the eater and offering a sense of play. At some point, it might be wise and kind to let go and remember, De gustibus non disputandum est. Cooking is a complex art, but eating needn’t be.
A meal tells a story. The stories told by service à la française and à la russe seem more like a novel, where you must patiently move from one chapter to the next. A thali is more like an anthology. Is one way better than the other? Definitely not! Both can be embraced. A thali-style service or, as I would now like to christen it, “le service à l’indienne,” can be a source of global culinary inspiration.
So, dear host, I urge you to serve an anthology at your next dinner, and dear chef, may I take the liberty of nudging you in the same direction? A lunchtime “Thali Thursday” perhaps, since Tuesdays are for tacos. With a fixed-price menu, the financial aspect is dealt with prior to the meal and takes away any mental calculations that someone with a smaller wallet might make if they were sitting down for an à la carte experience. When a meal is more accessible and affordable, a diner can relax and truly enjoy it. There are perks for the restaurant, too. A set menu also benefits back-end planning and front-end execution. When a single daily menu is combined with a thali’s scope of choice, there is opportunity to be creative while being economically strategic; kitchen costs can be reduced by rerouting extras, repurposing leftovers, exploiting market specials — minimizing the use of the expensive and maximizing the use of the affordable. In the front of the house, ordering time is negligible, service begins immediately, and overall service time is drastically reduced as food flows from the kitchen to the plate without spending time on the chef’s pass. Mealtimes are shorter and tables are turned faster. But there’s still a feeling of Akshaya Patra (the Indian cornucopia), of grandeur, generosity, and genial hospitality in a seemingly gargantuan and limitless meal. Things can be further simplified if you decide to offer a limited thali, because palatability is bound to remain high. Here is some science to support that: the pleasantness of a food declines as you eat it; this “sensory specific satiety” is apparently at max just two minutes into eating a particular food! You avoid it simply by alternating bites of different items. A thali ensures an enjoyable meal.
Finally, please know that I am not asking you to be culturally inclusive or relevant or cross-cultural. What I am trying to do is introduce you to a potential muse — a flowy, unscripted, engaging, and delectable experience. Interpreting and implementing service à l’indienne in the West may be a challenge, but I implore you to disrupt the course (pun intended). ●
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